Also, you're most welcome Manuela. You have an amazing blog. You're idea to marry poems with a piece of music is great. I only wish I wasn't such a classical music dilettante. I also read some of your poems. Very nicely done.

Thank you, Julian, this has been a very quiet (!) blog, and it is wonderful to have you visit and comment - come and say hi anytime!

I am moved to hear you read some of my poems, and glad you like the combination of music and poetry. I know shockingly little about classical music myself, mostly I go by what feels like the right music for a poem or poem for a piece of music- which is why it would probably be different for someone else, and that's part of the fun.

I searched for info on Kathryn Starbuck, and, my goodness, did she grieve! I was so moved to read how she said she found some joy in the middle of her grief through poetry...

welcome

Manuela

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do.- Adrienne Rich

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. - Denise Levertov

Before, under, and through the wonderful terrible wrestling with words and music there is a state of mind which I’m calling ‘poetic attention’ ... a sort of readiness, a species of longing which is without the desire to possess, and it does not really wish to be talked about. - Don McKay

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I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. - Ursula Le Guin